There is a growing movement to adopt not just a code of ethics for agile coaching, but to adopt much more of the norms and practices of professional coaching. I published an earlier version of this topic as a LinkedIn article.
We need to see more professional coaching in the agile coaching discipline. This means keeping people at the heart of everything we do, guiding individuals and teams to realise their potential according to their agenda (rather than ours or management’s).
This is far more powerful than teaching a new set of techniques and processes, facilitating a team to resolve their impediments, or even planning and leading a transformation. However, it is much harder, meaning that many of us steer clear of this form of coaching, as it feels fluffy, indistinct, or emotional.
Going back to the manifesto, the first value pair puts more emphasis on individuals and interactions than on processes and tools, but where do we spend most of our time? I would suggest that it that it is still in building playbooks for how teams fit into tribes, how we align and plan quarterly, and how we unblock and smooth flow of work.
Important? Yes. Transformative? No.
To truly transform an organisation, we need to free every individual to transform themselves, into what they need to become. We cannot do that my mandating a change program and enforcing a playbook.
This is a hard shift to make, and one I have been working on for the last 5 years or so, with increasing success (and lots of missteps along the way). I’m keen to explore this with others, and this is one of my focus areas in the coming months.
These thoughts build on several sources:
In a discussion with the NZ personal agility crew and Cheryl Tansey, we talked about how the concept of homeostasis can be applied to describe how individuals and organisations respond to change. Naturally wanting to bring things back into stability as quickly as possible. This can look like resistance, but we need to reposition this as a natural response and work with it.
This connected for me with an article by Kylie Ryan, on ‘The Uncoachable Client‘, that advocated for us as coaches to be self-aware; that if individuals, teams, or organisations are not fulfilling the change they’ve espoused and engaged us to help, that is more likely to be us at fault than them.
An interesting post from Shruti Chadha, on ‘Coaching is Not Therapy‘, that distinguished between life coaching and therapy, was the clincher to trigger me committing something to words. Loosely speaking, therapy is to help the client navigate through trauma to healing; so is necessarily backward-looking. Coaching, on the other hand, is intended to help the client unblock and empower themselves to make the transformation to become the person they want to be; so is more forward-focused.
I am now undertaking a professional coaching program, run by CoachMasters Academy, aligned with the International Coaching Federation. Professional coaching today (third generation) is transformative; intended to guide the client / coachee toward expanding their mindset and growing their skills so that they are more resilient and better able to sustain themselves through change in future. Using an old analogy, this is teaching them to fish, so they can eat for life, rather than just giving them a fish, so they can eat for a day.
Recognising the pervasive culture of coaching avoidance in ourselves as coaches is the first step in supporting each other toward better practice, healthier people, and significantly improved outcomes.
I would love to hear your thoughts.
